(NNPA) – On Jan. 2, Soledad O’Brien’s new program aired on CNN entitled, “Starting Point.” Her new show fills in the 7-9 a.m. slot left after the demise of the American Morning Block. CNN has referred to the shows as being a “conversational ensemble” with O’Brien at the center.
This change comes after CNN announced in late October that it was revamping its morning lineup, with O’Brien and former MSNBC anchor, Ashleigh Banfield were named to be among the anchors of a new early programming schedule.
Former “American Morning” anchor O’Brien, who co-hosted from 2003-2007, was recruited back to mornings for the second shift–just in time for the Jan. 3rd Iowa caucuses. According to Broadcasting & Cable, O’Brien will report live from Des Moines, Iowa on Jan. 2 and 3.
A graduate of Harvard University, O’Brien is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She began her career as an associate producer and news writer at the then NBC affiliate WBZ-TV in Boston. She would work long hours as a local reporter and bureau chief for NBC affiliate KRON in San Francisco.
She later joined NBC in 1991 in New York where she worked as a field producer for Nightly News and TODAY. O’Brien came to CNN, where she anchored the network’s Weekend Today since July 1999. At CNN, O’Brien would earn numerous awards and accolades for groundbreaking coverage and reports.
She became co-anchor of CNN’s flagship morning program, American Morning in July 2003. There she covered world-changing events like Hurricane Katrina, Southeast and Thailand Tsunamis, and the 2005 London terrorist attacks. She earned the George Foster Peabody Award for her Katrina coverage and the Alfred I. DuPont Award for her coverage of the tsunami. Other accolades include the Gracie Allen Award in 2007 on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, a NAACP President’s Award, also in 2007, for her humanitarian efforts and journalistic excellence. In 2008, she received the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Goodermote Humanitarian Award for her reports on Katrina and the Southeast Asia tsunami and was the first recipient of the Soledad O’Brien Freedom’s Voice Award from Morehouse School of Medicine for promoting social change. O’Brien was also awarded the Brotherhood Crusade Pioneer African American Achievement Award by the Brotherhood Crusade in 2009.
One of her most recent projects was Black in America 2, which was a four-hour documentary that focused on successful community leaders who improved quality of life for African Americans.
O’Brien’s Black in America in 2008 revealed that state of Blacks 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She has also reported for the CNN documentary Words That Changed a Nation, which featured never-before-seen footage of Dr. King’s private writings and notes, and her investigation of his assassination. Her project, Children of the Storm and One Crime at a Time documentaries have shown her dedication to stories coming out of New Orleans.